y of lead, we made our way
through the wearisome sand to a farmhouse. There I feigned even a more
insufficient French than I possess naturally, and let it appear that we
were pedestrians from Biarritz who had lost our way along the shore and
got benighted.

This explained us pretty well, I thought, and we got most heartening
coffee and a cart to a little roadside station. My uncle grew more
and more manifestly ill with every stage of our journey. I got him to
Bayonne, where he refused at first to eat, and was afterwards very sick,
and then took him shivering and collapsed up a little branch line to a
frontier place called Luzon Gare.

We found one homely inn with two small bedrooms, kept by a kindly Basque
woman. I got him to bed, and that night shared his room, and after an
hour or so of sleep he woke up in a raging fever and with a wandering
mind, cursing Neal and repeating long, inaccurate lists of figures. He
was manifestly a case for a doctor, and in the morning we got one in.
He was a young man from Montpelier, just beginning to practise, and very
mysterious and technical and modern and unhelpful. He spoke of cold
and exposure, and la grippe and pneumonia. He gave many explicit and
difficult directions.... I perceived it devolved upon me to organise
nursing and a sick-room. I installed a religieuse in the second bedroom
of the inn, and took a room for myself in the inn of Port de Luzon, a
quarter of a mile away.

VII

And now my story converges on what, in that queer corner of refuge
out of the world, was destined to be my uncle's deathbed. There is a
background of the Pyrenees, of blue hills and sunlit houses, of the old
castle of Luzon and a noisy cascading river, and for a foreground the
dim, stuffy room whose windows both the religieuse and hostess
conspired to shut, with its waxed floor, its four-poster bed, its
characteristically French chairs and fireplace, its champagne bottles
and dirty basins and used towels and packets of Somatose on the table.
And in the sickly air of the confined space in behind the curtains
of the bed lay my little uncle, with an effect of being enthroned and
secluded, or sat up, or writhed and tossed in his last dealings of life.
One went and drew back the edge of the curtains if one wanted to speak
to him or look at him.

Usually he was propped up against pillows, because so he breathed more
easily. He slept hardly at all.

I have a confused memory of vigils and mornings an